Blackstone Rising

Act 1 "The Bridge", Scene 1

Hardware Issues

17

AUG/14

As you sit around the card table in the Runner Haven basement of the Second Chance Bar, most of you disbelievingly agawk at apparently intelligent black sphere before you, you pause to think back on the events of the last two and a half hours. You arrived at Sherriffstown, a few of you for the first time, and were accosted by some of the neighborhood’s more colorful characters: Mala noted the discomfort of the local law enforcers, some of them barely 15; Ashleigh saw that some of her recon training had been put to good use by her much older protege, Bert; Echo was dismayed to note that nearly everyone seemed to know she was about to come out of retirement; and Hyperion expertly avoided having to speak to a pretty woman who had taken an interest in, at the very least, his drink order. Once settled underneath the bar, Bart, with some assistance from Luther, his trollish bodyuard, played your a trid featuring Hyperion’s research partner, Marco Ferretti. Ferretti detailed his theft of SugarPlum, a sentient dance experience, from their employer, Hatsuishi robotics, after being told that the project was going to be taken away from them. He asked Hyperion to break back into the labs and offices along the Everett docks and have SugarPlum upload the kill code on his now forfeit nanotech research. Doing so would rob Hatsuishi of any sort of access to the dangerous tech and would seal the likely already sealed fates of both scientists working on the spherical intelligence. Bart asked that the runners he had assembled to help Hyperion carry out this task also retrieve for him a prototype cybernetic dog harness and insisted that you would be compensated handsomely by Mr. Ferretti via a dead man’s switch. You spent the next couple hours meeting and slowly coming to accept the reality of SugarPlum, while hashing out how precisely you’d break into Hatsuishi Robotics. With a tripartite plan figured out, you are just now thinking about getting to the offices before the evening is over. It is 4:30pm on the afternoon of Sunday, February 21st, 2077 and you are all in good health.